The Diary of Ma Yan

August 15, 2005
This affecting volume collects diary entries penned by a Hui Muslim girl living with her family in a single-room house in rural China. In his articulate introduction, Haski explains how Ma Yan's mother came to hand him the diary that her daughter (now 16) kept when she was 13 and 14. Ma Yan's illiterate mother, while suffering from an ulcer, undertook a job of hard labor hundreds of miles from home to pay for her daughter's education. The girl's determination to excel at school figures prominently in the entries: "I must work really hard in order to go to university later. Then I'll get a good job, and Mother and Father will at last have a happy life." Though frequent restatements of this goal, numerous references to Ma Yan's fear of disappointing her mother and recaps of similar classroom incidents make for rather repetitious reading, they do underscore the girl's extraordinary resolve, generosity of spirit and resilience. Many of the details will open youngsters' eyes (e.g., Ma Yan went without food for days to save money to buy a pen; each weekend, she and her brother walked more than 12 miles to and from school, where they boarded during the week and often went hungry). This heartfelt diary inspired the creation of the Association for the Children of Ningxia (to which a portion of the book's proceeds will be donated), dedicated to helping others like Ma Yan stay in school. Ages 10-up.

August 1, 2005
Gr 5-8 -In 2001, while a French journalist was visiting remote Ningxia province in northwest China, a Muslim woman wearing the white headscarf of the Hui people thrust the diaries of her daughter into his hands. The three small notebooks described the girl's struggle to get an education despite extreme poverty. Each week Ma Yan and her younger brothers walked seven miles to school where they stayed until Friday night when they returned home. Often their only food was a small bowl of rice at midday. Only occasionally did they have a bit of money to buy some vegetables in the market or to catch a tractor ride home for the weekend. Ma Yan studied hard, but she did not feel successful unless she was number one in her class. When she didn't rank first, she was berated by her mother and made to feel guilty for her lack of effort. Her parents worked constantly to make a better life for their children, farming their own fields, harvesting crops for others, and collecting the plant "fa cai" from the steppes north of their home. The girl's feelings for her mother were powerful and complex, and she alternated between overwhelming love and rage at the injustices she suffered. While this book will not hold the interest of average readers because of its overly didactic tone, it does paint a vivid portrait of the daily life of a child in a part of the world seldom visited." -Barbara Scotto, Michael Driscoll School, Brookline, MA"

Copyright 2005 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2005
Gr. 6-9. "I want to go to school, Mother. . . . How wonderful it would be if I could go to school forever!" Thirteen-year-old Ma Yan, a peasant in the drought-scarred province of Ningxia, China, evidently scrawled this message in frustration at having to work in the fields. According to a preface, Ma Yan's mother passed her daughter's plea to visiting French journalist Haski, along with journals documenting about nine months of Ma Yan's life. Haski published them in France and established a charity to assist similarly impoverished Ningxia students, to which Ma Yan has since promised 25 percent of her royalties. Some adults may be troubled by the diary's odd provenance and the purposeful annotations framing Ma Yan's rather meandering reflections. Nonetheless, the affecting story, extended with photos of Ma Yan and her family, will push readers to a new understanding of the hardscrabble existence endured by many, even as her brooding reflections ("My moods go up and down") underscore how much teens everywhere have in common. Some captions and photos not seen. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)

July 1, 2005
Paired with black-and-white photos, these writings of a thirteen-year-old girl from impoverished rural China document the struggles she and her family, especially her mother, have to make to keep her in school. The intermittent chapters of background information on Ma Yan's family and her culture give context to the sometimes redundant but nonetheless moving and eye-opening diary entries.

(Copyright 2005 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)